Tuesday, April 6, 2010

If You Give A Teacher Technology

Have you ever had the chance to read books written by Laura Numeroff? One of her bestsellers is If You Give A Mouse A Cookie and it follows a wonderful pattern. If you give the mouse a cookie they are going to want milk. If you give them the milk they are going to want a straw and so on. Today I had the pleasure of sitting down with one of the teachers in my building and showing her our district's Wiki/Blog. Our conversation reminded me of the pattern of this book!

We started off the conversation with clarifying the difference between the two web tools. Wikis being a collaborative space for multiple users to have input and Blogs typically being an individual's work where others can comment. As I showed her some examples of how these tools were being utilized in other classrooms I could see the wheels turning and her thoughts running wild.

So I had her back up and tell me what she was thinking about doing before we had started chatting and exploring and she had shared that she was going to have kids post a sentence or two about what they had learned that day. But she shared that with seeing all the possibilities of what other students had produced using these tools, and through our discussion, she felt like there were so many different directions she could go and she needed to rethink how to use Wikis and Blogs.

So we are scheduled to sit down again on Friday and continue our conversation. I am so excited to see how her thinking has evolved and where she is going to take her students (and me!) on this journey in using Web 2.0 tools!